Don’t miss this unintentionally hilarious graphic from the Wall Street Journal on the hardship of taxes. We learn, for example, that the frazzled working mother of two children making $260,000 a year will have to pay an additional $3,356 in federal taxes for 2013. My heart bleeds.

I say you could pop this graphic wholesale into Mad Magazine and it would be brilliant satire.

And as Charles Pierce points out, the only people on the graphic not paying more taxes are African-American. Yeah, real subtle.

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I’m wondering if the one Asian single woman working as a finanacial analyst on Wall St. really looks like that. Because the number of single women making that kind of money must be small enough that it wouldn’t surprise me if there were actually only one person. And, as Kevin Drum points out, it’s only a 1.3% increase for her.

To be fair, why go to Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island, or Bronx, to look for single moms/parents?
Or, even to the cafe’s or restaurants nearby?
There are apparently a few single moms/parents working in law firms, or as bank execs, who are making over $250,000 a year.

This is reminiscent of the New Yorker cover, where you see the Hudson River, NJ, the “fly-over” country, and CA and the Pacific.

Only, instead, it shows the people the WSJ considers “middle class.” And, apparently, in their little insular world, that starts off somewhere north of $180,000 for Black retired couples (LOL!!!), $230,000 for an Asian-looking single person, $250,000 for single parents, and $650,000 for married couples with 4 children.
Oh, but that it were so!

Between the WSJ and FOX “News,” Murdoch rules the world of satire.
And satire, as we once knew it, is dead.
R.I.P. Satire.

Everybody has a hell of a chunk of investment income, even the young ones. Must be Romney-related. Everybody’s investment income is equivalent to more than the average annual income, and double or better what a minimum-wage earner makes. And we’re supposed to sympathize? The fact that they have investment income instead of near-zero-interest savings account income shows that they are pretty well-connected with brokers who know banksters well enough not to get robbed. Yet.

I am grateful that there is at least a comical side to this. I keep looking at the graphic, smiling and shaking my head.

The hopeful, naive part of me sees a very small ember of self reflection in “compelled by their ideology”. The write has at least got a glimpse of the absurdity of movement conservatism. Whether they see it as absurdity or simply the call for a new marketing strategy will determine the next act of our national melodrama.

My right wing friends seem to glory in the actions of Whole Foods and Papa John’s in shafting their workers out of health care insurance. They seem unaware that this displays the failure of the market to provide a decent life for working people and how the objectivist belief in the capitalist utopia engendered by a free market, is a childish fantasy.

My right wing friends seem to glory in the actions of Whole Foods and Papa John’s in shafting their workers out of health care insurance. They seem unaware that this displays the failure of the market to provide a decent life for working people and how the objectivist belief in the capitalist utopia engendered by a free market, is a childish fantasy.

Goatherd, that kinda made my day. Although I wish it weren’t even necessary.

“I can’t relate to those kind of numbers. Maybe I should have paid attention in school”

I concur, I did pay attention in school (sort of) I’m an engineer, making better than average money in my field, I aint even half way to the money the retired folks are making. What world do these people live in?

This is a little OT, or maybe not. Reminds me of the Simpsons episode when Ned Flanders built an amusement park in memory of his late wife, Maude, and the visitors began “speaking in tongues” thanks to a gas leak.

So this is what happens when a gas leak builds his own amusement park:

Whole Foods CEO may be committing industrial suicide. Most of his target audience does not look favorably on his business practices. He then goes out of his way to advertize those business practices. Is he fishing for a new demographic?

I can’t take my eyes off the baby in the lower right corner. He’s wishing Single Asian Chick into the cornfield right now, and everybody else in the image is desperately thinking “happy thoughts… happy thoughts… happy thoughts…”